Korean-Mexican Taco

A short queue forms behind a converted catering van parked along the curb on Wilshire Boulevard in late 2008. The cook works a flat-top inside the truck through the service window, dropping marinated short rib onto the hot steel in a sizzle that announces itself to the back of the line. The meat caramelises in twenty seconds because the marinade is built on soy and pear and sugar; the cook chops it on the iron, drops it into a doubled corn tortilla pulled off the tortilla warmer beside her, sets a spoon of kimchi relish on top with a pinch of toasted sesame, finishes with cilantro, onion, and a squeeze of lime, and the order goes out across the counter wrapped in foil-backed paper. Two tacos cost about three dollars. The cook is Roy Choi. The truck is Kogi. The crowd has come because the truck's location was tweeted out forty minutes earlier.

The structural fact is that two long-established street cuisines are running on the same small piece of bread. The tortilla is the Mexican baseline: a small soft warm corn round, doubled if the load is wet, dressed at the eater's side with cilantro, raw white onion, lime. The protein is the Korean baseline: a thin-sliced beef short rib (galbi) or a thin-sliced ribeye (bulgogi) or a sliced pork shoulder (jeyuk bokkeum) marinated in soy, sugar, garlic, sesame oil, and grated Asian pear, then seared hot enough to caramelise the marinade on the meat. The dressing brings both cuisines through together: a kimchi-and-soy or kimchi-and-onion salsa carrying the ferment, a thin gochujang-and-soy hot sauce carrying the chile-paste heat, a sprinkle of toasted sesame carrying the nut-toast aroma, sometimes a shredded cabbage slaw. The bite is supposed to read as a taco and a Korean grill skewer at the same moment, and the dressing is what holds the two readings together against the sugar and salt of the marinade.

The build fails in three places a fast cook learns the names of. A short rib left on the iron too long goes leathery and the marinade goes from caramelised to acrid; one pulled too early misses the sear and reads grey and sweet on the tortilla. A single corn tortilla under a wet, saucy load tears at the bottom before the second bite goes in, which is why a careful cook doubles the corn even when the menu does not say so. A kimchi relish chopped fine and let sit gives up its liquid into the meat and floods the tortilla; one chopped coarse and dressed at the moment of plating holds. The hot sauce, if too thick, paints rather than threads through the bite; if too thin, runs off the meat into the wrapper. A working line at a Korean-Mexican truck is a study in keeping a marinated sweet protein from drowning a soft tortilla in liquid.

The taco arrives in the hand still hissing faintly under the foil. The smell comes up first as caramelised soy and sesame, then as the fresh sour brightness of the kimchi, then as the cilantro and onion. The corn under it is warm and pliant, and the first bite gives a soft give from the doubled tortilla against the slight resistance of the seared meat. The marinade reads as sweet and savoury at the front of the tongue, the kimchi as sharp and sour a beat later, the gochujang as a low warm chile burn that builds across the second taco rather than landing on the first. The sesame on top crunches faintly between the molars. The fingers are sticky by the second taco and a paper napkin is doing real work; the eater is leaning forward off the curb to keep the marinade off the shoes.

The ordering grammar at a Kogi-derived window borrows from both sides. The standard call is the meat and the count: two short rib, one spicy pork, or in the abbreviated form short rib, spicy pork, chicken, with the count inferred from a paper menu posted to the side. The hot-sauce option is asked at the window (spicy or no?); the kimchi relish is the default and a customer who wants the dressing on the side asks for it. The truck's circuit was, in the early years, published by tweet, with the customer learning the corner from the @kogibbq account at lunch and dinner; the practice of broadcasting the food-truck location on Twitter dates from Kogi's first months in November 2008 and is the convention most subsequent gourmet food trucks adopted. The bilingual menu boards run side by side, English on top and Korean below.

The siblings clarify what the Kogi line specifically did. The broader taco truck taco is the format and the institution that Kogi rolled into: the working Mexican-immigrant loncheras of greater Los Angeles, already numbering in the thousands by 2008, that had built the wheeled-mobile-kitchen template Kogi adopted and adapted. A generic Korean barbecue meat dropped into a tortilla without the kimchi-and-sesame apparatus is a plainer Korean taco rather than a Korean-Mexican one, and the difference is the cross-cuisine dressing the Kogi build specifically anchored. A Korean barbecue meat wrapped inside a closed flour cylinder with rice, beans, and cheese is a Korean burrito, a heavier American-Mexican fast-casual build on different physics. What this dish is, specifically, is the small soft open Mexican tortilla taking a thin slice of Korean-marinated meat alongside the full Korean dressing apparatus, with the truck as the canonical service vessel.

A recession truck and a Twitter feed

The Korean-Mexican taco as a recognisable cross-cuisine build has a documented origin. The Kogi BBQ truck began service in Los Angeles in late November 2008, founded by the chef Roy Choi with the brothers-in-law Mark Manguera and Caroline Shin, who proposed the cross-cuisine concept and recruited Choi to develop the menu. Choi was a Korean-American chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, with kitchen experience at the Beverly Hilton among other Los Angeles fine-dining stops; the Kogi truck was a recession-era pivot away from a stalled hotel-restaurant career. The first truck operated a Twitter feed (@kogibbq) publishing the truck's daily corners in real time, and Kogi is widely credited in food-trade and technology press of the late 2000s as the first food truck to use Twitter as its primary publication channel.

The cross-cuisine combination Choi and Manguera built rested on a particular Los Angeles geography. The city's Koreatown, established formally with that designation in 1980 around Olympic Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, sits a short drive from the city's heaviest Mexican-immigrant taco-truck routes through East Los Angeles and the Eastside, and the two cuisines had been adjacent on Los Angeles streets for decades before Kogi put them inside the same tortilla. Choi was raised in part in Los Angeles and absorbed both cuisines as a child eater rather than as a chef inventing them at the cross. The first Kogi truck was a converted catering van operated out of a licensed commissary on the Mexican-immigrant lonchera model the 1974 Los Angeles County mobile-food-service code had made legally legible.

The Kogi BBQ truck began service in Los Angeles in late November 2008 under Roy Choi as chef, with Mark Manguera and Caroline Shin as cofounders, publishing its daily corners through the Twitter account @kogibbq. Choi was named a Best New Chef by Food and Wine in 2010, the first Best New Chef from a food truck in the magazine's history.